


In a Kinder Universe

by spiritikran



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22026319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritikran/pseuds/spiritikran
Summary: Theo ponders why he won’t go to England, and remembers more than he bargained for.
Relationships: Theodore Decker & Boris Pavlikovsky, Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Kudos: 50





	In a Kinder Universe

**Author's Note:**

> The Goldfinch is a perfect piece of media for me to write about, since I have an in canon reason to write in an over the top ambiguously poetic style. I’m a big fan of the way Donna Tartt reveals bits of information through parentheses, so I had fun trying to emulate that.

Going to England was the perfect solution, and I couldn’t believe it had taken a suggestion from Boris, of all people, for the thought to even cross my mind.

Sure, there were some technical hiccups to get around. Sure, it would cost me money I really couldn’t afford to spend. Sure, I’d have to find a way to explain it to Hobie that wouldn’t make him consider putting some kind of cross-continental restraining order between me and Pippa. 

But it was worth it, wasn’t it? 

(“Is what you want, no?” I remember Boris had asked me back in Antwerp.)

And it was. It was what I wanted more than anything else. Just the idea of it, of her, gave me a morphine-warm rush.

Pippa, and the way she nestled like a startled bird under her bundle of scarves. Pippa, and her sun-bright eyes and sad smiles and the stagger in her step that had never fully disappeared. Pippa, left-behind evidence of a long-ago explosion. The perfect piece of sharpnel, damaged but in tact.

And so close to being mine, if only I could get my shit together enough to put myself in her path.

And yet- Boris is right.

(You want to know what I think?” he asked, one dark eyebrow raised, inviting an answer to that question as if he wasn’t going to offer his opinion anyway. A long pause. Jimmy Stewart’s midwestern accent, by now a kind of droning static, in the background. Then,

“I think you will not do it.”)

He knew. I don’t know in the mothefucking hell he knew, but he’s right. I won’t bring myself to do it.

I’d like to think it’s insecurity that’s holding me back, or maybe the doubt that Pippa wouldn’t be nearly as glad to see me as I’d be glad to see her (a ridiculous concern- without fail, she always is, even if it’s only to see me as a friend.) Hell, I’d even be content to convince myself the thought of Everett repulsed me enough to make me think twice before setting foot on any plane, to go anywhere.

But the truth-

Well, for so long it had stayed buried under a layer of rubble that had been piling up in my mind since that fateful day at the museum. In the blissful distraction of my travels, I’d thought it was buried for good.

Then I made the mistake of coming back to New York City, the site of that ancient disaster- the city I’d returned to only to find I’d never really left. It took me being back here for the truth to finally excavate itself, as if the familiar metropolitan air gave it strength to claw its way out with a violence. And now that the truth is free, nothing else I tell myself, no cocktail of drugs I try to flush it out with, can drive it back out of sight.

The truth is: Pippa is not a home I can run to.

Even now, she’s said, there are still some days where she struggles to stand from the sheer weight of it all; she’s a structure on the verge of collapsing. A creature fragile as a long-forgotten museum piece, eager to escape from unearned admiration. Always in motion, flitting off in her songbird way, never perching in one place for too long. In a way, she is the freedom I can only long for. She is goodness, and mercy, and a symphony of unplayed music notes lost in the swift, deafening boom of that day. She is all the things I couldn’t bury with my mother.

And, she’s not all that I’ve failed to bury.

—

Like those nightmares I used to have where to no avail I searched for my mother in dingy and abandoned places, thoughts of that hazy conversation with Boris are a recurring, intrusive presence in my life.

I’d tried to banish it from my mind, bury all of it- that sleazy, half asleep city, the panic of losing the painting after thinking it was safely mine, the shootout, the death, and most of all the confusion of the nights that had followed- under the mess of mental rubble. But, in the spaces of time when the drugs start to wear off, it’s Boris’ voice I hear, clear as if I was back there again, still having that conversation.

(“You forget, Potter, I also know how it is to be an addict.” Try as I might, I can’t picture his lips mouthing those words in the darkness; I think he was saying it into my ear, secretive-criminal-soft. Like in the old days. “If it was something you really need, so badly you cannot live without it- you would find way to get it, no?”

I found it rather nervy of him to say, after his whole heroin-deathbed sphiel. But if I’d thought of a witty response, it wasn’t what tumbled of my lips. Instead, I had just resorted to what was my default these days: a shaky “I don’t know.” Followed, like clockwork, with “I’m sorry.”

“No, do not be sorry.” Boris answered. Maybe I was just high out of my mind, but I swear he leaned against my shoulder; probably just trying to support his bleeding arm. “I’m not. Used to be. Ashamed, sorry. For longest time! But, now-“

He bit his lip; I pretended not to notice. There was a youthful , mischievousness in his expression that I hadn’t seen since Vegas- that I realized, with a growing ache, I had missed since that long ago.

(I had missed him. God, it was pathetic how much I had missed Boris.)

—-

(We repeated an old ritual, that sacred oath involving knuckles, kissing away shame and blood. Lips, meeting flesh. Just me and Boris, and the night, in all of its cruelness, pressing in on us.)

——

(A failure I cannot bear to think of. )

———-

So. I will not bring myself to go to England. It’s not for lack of a compelling reason. It’s not that I don’t love Pippa (because I do, I swear I do.)

Maybe it’s just Boris’ influence creeping into my psyche, but I’m coming to believe my course in this universe has always been steadfast and pre-determined, and that it was every bit of depression and loneliness, or conversely every moment of love and light, and not Pippa, that have led me dutifully along in that course. In this universe, where I’d had to to bury my mother, Pippa and I had been thrown together by tragedy but destined by circumstance to remain apart. It was inevitable that one day she would go where I couldn’t follow her. That one day, I would have to stop chasing her.

Who knows, maybe in a kinder universe, it would have turned out differently. In a kinder universe, I might not have been a murderer, responsible for a pattern of death that had started with my mother. I might never have been caught up in an endless cycle of destroy, destroy, destroy.

In a kinder universe, I might (and this was the ideal) never have known Pippa at all. I might never have known what it was like to have loved and to have lost, and to still love despite it all. Or, maybe, I’d have been able to love Pippa the way she deserved, or I might even have been able to love Kitsey, or some other equally stunning and well-off woman, like I was supposed to.

As it was, I’d killed. (“Bang bang,” Boris had mimicked a gun with his finger, trying to comfort me by making light of Marty’s death).

As it was, I’d destroyed. Directly, I’d destroyed so much of myself I was unrecognizable. Indirectly - nothing that couldn’t be restored, nothing that hadn’t come back to me, but that would haunt me nonetheless.

As it was, I loved too much, in all the wrong ways. As it was, I loved with an addict’s love, a love that was more like a need.

(As it was, it was Boris- his messy curls and his loyalty, who didn’t belong in New York but would live there, would live anywhere, if I asked; Boris who was, as I was, essentially homeless, who was the moon that followed me- who was all the things I needed.)


End file.
